IE selects whole words and it takes extra effort to select only partial words. Firefox does not automatically select whole words (unless there is a preference for that behavior that I don’t know about).
A problem with automatically selecting whole words is that you also catch the space at the end which isn’t what you want when selecting text for a link.
I’m going to have to go ahead and make a rare disagreement with you. I think it’s done playfully and “artistically”. Especially considering that GILD seems to have started it (or at least promoted it, due to his coolness and all).
I like it and I’ve considered doing it, but it’s just too stylistically daring for me.
I just thought of something else, though. I think breaking the words like that will hinder searching. I’m not sure whether the full-text database is updated in real time, but at some point, we can try searching this forum for
bagel recipe (I made a tinyurl out of it because the URL I picked actually contains the words b____ r______, which would mess up the test)
Since this post does not contain the words b a g e l _ r e c i p e – except as broken up by the bracketed URL – I’m not sure whether you could search for those words.
It depends on whether vBulletin treats BB codes as whitespace or whether it just sucks them out before doing the full-text indexing. In other words, does the word end up as the two words ‘ba’ and ‘gel’ or as one word?
Ha! The full-text database does appear to be updated in real time.
A search for bagel recipe found nothing.
But a search for ba gel rec ipe found my above post.
My computer mind strikes again!
If you break up the words like that, you hinder searching – UNLESS you also mention those same words somewhere else in your post.
Thank you, Mr. Lowell, for steering the discussion to the area that I was unable to aim for, (due to general lack of technical knowledge). Now I wait to see what - if any - gold is uncovered in this vein.
{edit: you posted a second time before I could post this}
I hate to be the bearer of bad news like that! Making links that way is an eccentricity unique to our little community. And the fact that Dave (GILD) started it makes it even cooler. Now, with a documented reason not to do it, have I taken some of the fun out of it?
Oh, the curse of my computer mind! 
I wasn’t saying nobody does it on purpose… 
Firefox: Double-click=word, triple-click=paragraph. Handy for individual words, not so much for phrases or sentences. I know MS Word lets you select sentences with Ctrl/Command-click, but not Firefox…
It appears to be a method of linking that is done hurriedly, without much thought given to neatness. Like if someone just swiped their cursor over the the text with the sole purpose of highlighting some text in a general vicinity.
Having said that, I will say that I don’t dislike when people do it. It’s just that my human mind appreciates some things nicely lined up. I guess it has not completely progressed to post-modernity…
It’s only bad news for vBulletin. File a bug report with vBulletin. It’s a bug in their software. No need for GILD or anyone else to change behavior to suit their buggy code.
I just tried a search for “color”. The vBulletin search manages to find posts that contain the COLOR tag but no other use of the word color.
They really should strip out the tags before indexing a search.
I know they strip out “noise” words like the/and/or/I/you and the likes. You can even enter your own words to ignore, such as ‘teh’ and other bad words. I’m not sure whether they do stemming, which indexes “unicycle”, “unicycles”, “unicycling”, and “unicycled” as the same normalized word – “unicycle” or “unicycl”. This allows for easier searching (assuming, of course, they stem the search criteria before searching!).
Based on what you found [John], I bet they just strip out punctuation, including the brackets and stuff, and then index whatever is left.